VMware CEO Says It’s a ‘Good Time’ to Be Looking at Acquisitions

CEO of VMware, Inc. Pat Gelsinger, whose parent company is in the midst of being acquired by Dell Inc. is considering its own shopping expedition.

A decrease in both evaluations "unicorn" and "Unicorn swagger" means that the virtualization software company is more likely to acquisitions, he said in an interview.

Gelsinger joined executives of Silicon Valley as CEO Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Meg Whitman, and business development manager, David Drummond, Inc alphabet welcome the opportunity for bargains. Apple CEO Tim Cook, CEO of Salesforce.com Inc. and Marc Benioff Inc. also commented potential acquisitions in the new environment.

"We went from a sellers market to buyers in the market," Gelsinger said. "In that sense, it is a good time for us to be looking for."

VMware, which has more than $ 8 billion in cash and short-term investments, is capable of considering transactions worth "billions" he said. Anything over $ 5 million would be, however, much larger than the company has done in the past, he said. Priority areas for offers remain the same as in recent years: mobile products, cloud management, security and networking.

VMware's parent company EMC Corp. was bought by Dell for $ 67 billion, the largest acquisition in the history of technology.

When the explosive increase in the valuation of start-ups in the last two or three years, many public companies have been excluded from the market.

USA VC funding more than doubled from 2013 to 2015, the median assessment to begin funding rounds jump to $ 68 million in the third quarter of 2015, venture capitalist Mark Suster says. The Unicorn herd - companies valued at $ 1 billion or more - increased from 13 in early 2013 to more than 150, according to research firm CB Insights.

Now the capital began to flow more slowly up companies and valuations are declining. In the first quarter, there were 14 laps or outlets below previous scores down financing. During the fourth quarter of 2015, there were 16. That compares with six seven of these events in the previous two quarters, according to CB Insights.

This year, investment funds, including Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have lowered the value of their investments in new companies like Hootsuite Media Inc., Dropbox Inc., CloudFlare Inc., Cloudera Inc.., And DocuSign Inc. Zenefits .

"We looked at a couple of companies say that six months ago and had the unicorn unicorn assessment and arrogance," Gelsinger said. "You know," well I'm one billion [Evaluation] go to four, so. if you want to take me off the table, they pay me five, "so now, are perhaps half a billion go to: Ok let's have a discussion so that some of them become much more interesting conversations." .